surveillance
Latest
GPS datalogger captures speed, coordinates to SD
Parents looking to stalk their own children keep a watchful eye on the kids, but not interested in logging onto a website every five minutes to monitor Junior's whereabouts, can now ditch the live feed in favor of a product that lets them record their youngster's movements for later perusal. E-tailer Spark Fun Electronics has started offering a complete kit containing a GPS module, battery pack, embedded antenna, and most importantly, an SD-capable datalogger board that can capture up to 440 hours of coordinate data on a 256MB card, and display the resulting map on Google Earth. That's right, mom and dad, instead or paying for one of those commercial cellphone tracking services, simply sewing the Lassen iQ FAT16 Datalogger kit into a child's letter jacket or hiding it in their car will give you all the Big Brother-esque information you desire (including speed, for parents of lead-footed teens), and on your own time to boot. Showing your kids that extra little bit of overprotective love will set you back $140.[Via Make]
Web surfers to help Texas monitor border cams
Texas Governor Rick Perry has just announced a plan to leverage the eyeballs of millions of voyeuristic web surfers into a de facto army of unpaid border guards, by allowing the general public to watch live streams from video cameras trained on the Mexican border and call a toll-free number to report illegal crossings. Although the governor did not go into details on how many cameras would be installed nor how far apart they would be positioned, he did estimate the cost of the program at around five million dollars, which would buy almost 3,000 high-def HDR-HC3 camcorders even if Sony decided not to give the state a bulk discount. Leaving the whole immigration issue aside, what really stands out about this project is that it could possibly set a precedent for inner-city officials to open up their surveillance cameras to John Q. Public -- so instead of some authoritarian regime monitoring every citizen's activities, "Big Brother" will actually become all of us.[Via BBC News]
Surveyor SRV-1 bot monitors your home on the cheap
If you have one of those floors that need very close monitoring throughout the day, the Surveyor SRV-1 is the robot for you. The little unit can crawl around your home at around one foot per second, and reports back on its surroundings with a miniature VGA camera. A 100 meter range Zigbee 802.15.4 wireless receiver is included to let the SRV-1 stream its findings to your computer and up onto the web, and you can control and monitor the bot with any major operating system or via a web browser. If you don't feel like taking manual control of SRV-1, he can do fine by himself driving around, navigating obstacles, and even communicating with others of his kind via IR. The best news is the price: at $375 for the bot, the charger and the wireless base station, SRV-1 shouldn't break the bank, and seems ready to provide some good times for the robot hobbyist within us all.
Spy on friends and family with your iSight-enabled Mac
This post could also have been titled: "how to lose family and friends quickly with your iSight-enabled Mac." A poster over at macosxhints discovered that you can start a new video recording session in QuickTime Pro on an iSight-enabled Mac (for that low-profile surveillance look), and invoke Fast User Switching while the QT Pro session keeps on recording. For more stealth surveillance, you can set your display to shut off and, aside from the green light, most people will be none the wiser.Ethics and exclamations of 'how dare you?!' aside, I wonder if this 'built-in webcam' feature is going to inspire a new niche of unique video recording software.
